N. Sanity Beach
This article is about the level from the first game. For the first hub area of Crash Team Racing's Adventure Mode, see N. Sanity Beach (CTR). For the first hub area of Crash Twinsanity, see N. Sanity Isle. N. Sanity Beach is the first level of Crash Bandicoot. An iconic stage in the series, it takes Crash on a journey from the beautiful seaside beach his temporarily lifeless corpse initially washes up on, deep into the heart of the island's lush jungles, riddled with savage native stone carvings. Featuring a split path and a forward-scrolling crate bridge, it is an abject failure at being a lightweight simple first level for inept beginners. This being said, it is still lightweight and simple, sort of, featuring Crabby Crabs and Vibrating Wooden Turtles as the only impediments to Crashie's success. Behind-the-Scenes Development Factoids: Fan Speculation Unjustifiably Presented as Cold, Hard Facts! Despite being one of the earliest levels in the game - the first level, some would argue - it seems that N. Sanity Beach was one of the later levels programmed into the game. Perhaps you think I'm shitting you, but to the contrary, I am not. And I will prove it to you by pointing a series of things out, with bullets! *Halfway through this level, one will encounter a vertically oriented non-side-scrolling section, the only such area in the game, wherein Crashie ascends some stone ruins serving as the transition between beachy jungle-lite and full-on hardcore jungle action. If Naughty Dog came up with this idea earlier, it sure seems like they would have used it at least once more, right? I would be ever so pleased if you were to reassure me about my theory. I'm exceedingly insecure, you see. *In a similar vein, this is the only level in the game where the music seamfully changes halfway through the level. Despite adding a unique dynamic of dynamicness to this stage, this element never appears again in the game. Really should've, though. It might've made this shitty soundtrack pop a bit more. *In a similar vein to the last item, but not the first one, it is interesting to note that the music for the first half of this level is none other than the main theme song for this game! Yes, it's the same exact song you can hear on the title screen. This all but proves what a last-minute addition this truly was. No sane developers would make this move, as it would cause anyone who boots up the game for the first time, skips the intro cutscene, and dives right into the level to believe that this game hilariously only had one song in it! And, they would've thought, this game compares quite unfavourably to rival Nintendo's rival Super Mario 64 video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System 64, which has, like....at least three different songs, I think. *Generally speaking, it was a common practice during this era for developers to work on later levels before the early, easy ones. It seems that they were every bit as bored by those introductory levels as literally all non-five-year-olds who played them. Did you know that the Green Hill Zone in Sonic the Hedgehog was also notoriously developed late in its development cycle? No wonder it's the only zone in that game that doesn't look like wretched 8-bit sludge, but rather, semi-wretched 16-bit sludge. The same is true of this stage, if you multiply those figures by two. In unrelated news: For reasons unknown, in the beta version of Crash Bandicoot, N. Sanity Beach had a predominantly blue colour scheme to its surroundings. It can be assumed that this was changed as soon as a professional astronomer explained to Naughty Dog, a development team consisting of pathetic computer geeks who have never, ever, ever been outside, that, thanks to the invention of "chlorophyll", most plants are now actually some shade of green. Trivia . Here, it activates a stupid crate bridge that is a pain in the ass to fully clear. Little did he know that, in just six years' time, those fucking S&M perverts over at Vicarious Visions would have Mr. Bandicoot praying for a return to these simple, carefree days of exclamationism.....]] *This level's title refers to "insanity beaches", which are historically seaside communities used to imprison dangerous mental patients, under the pretence of being a luxurious vacation resort. They have only fallen out of favour internationally recently, though the concept lives on in many delightful island nations such as Aruba, Jamaica, Bermuda, and the Bahamas, where insane asylums are pretty much always located by the sea, because it is physically impossible for anything to not be located by the sea. *It is never clarified in the games what the initial N stands for in the level's name, despite many fans' intense clamouring for an answer. It is, however, plausible that it might stand for "No", as "No Sanity Beach" would have more or less precisely the same meaning. It is also plausible that it could stand for "Naughty Dog", due to developer egomania. (If this is the case, it can be presumed that they excluded the initialistic D because "N.D." sounds entirely too much like "endy", which might accidentally trick unsuspecting players into thinking this was the final level of the game.) *Due to this level's prestigious and historically significant position as the very first level in this very first game of the Crash Bandicoot series, a number of other games in the series have included levels of the same, or at least of a similar, name. Some fans claim that this is stupid and lazy, but it's an extremely common sort of practice throughout the video gaming industry - for example, as an homage to the original Super Mario Bros., several of the later side-scrolling Mario games also open with a level bearing the unique moniker of "World 1-1".